Companies today spend a significant amount of resources on market research. For example, to identify consumer trends in a specific geographic area, companies rely on information obtained from focus groups and telephone, internet, and face-to-face surveys. Companies consider information obtained from this market research when making risk-management decisions and other business decisions, such as whether to expand into a new geographic market. However, in addition to being expensive and labor intensive, these known market-research methods obtain information from a relatively small sample of consumers. Accordingly, these known market-research methods may not provide reliable and comprehensive results.
Other market research, which includes data from large samples of consumers, is currently available, but this market research identifies consumer trends at a high level within large populations of large geographic areas, such as populations of entire states or countries. Because this market research is based on data obtained from large, predefined geographic areas, companies cannot reliably use this market research to understand and identify consumer trends within smaller geographic areas. Accordingly, this market research is not particularly useful for companies when making risk-management decisions and other business decisions, such as whether to expand into new geographic markets because such decisions require detailed information on small segments of the population. What's more, these known market-research techniques may provide out-of-date results. This is because, in the time required to collect the data and prepare the results, changes occur in the marketplace.